 Gruman then managed the American Cancer Society's public education efforts directed toward adults from 1986 through 1988.She set up the nation's largest tobacco control demonstration project, ASSIST (the American Stop Smoking Intervention Study) at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health.In 1992, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation recruited Gruman to lead a new Washington DC-based policy institute, the Center for the Advancement of Health (renamed the Center for Advancing Health in 2009), to recognize the influence of behavioral, social, economic and environmental factors on health and disease.